I’m still in the Winter 1992 edition of Closed Loop (PCT Resources) on “Social Control”.
The lyrics of Genesis’ Get 'Em Out By Friday, penned by Peter Gabriel, sprang to mind:
This is an announcement from Genetic Control. It is my sad duty to inform you of a four-foot restriction on humanoid height.
“I hear the directors of Genetic Control
Have been buying all the properties that have recently been sold
Taking risks oh so bold
It’s said now that people will be shorter in height
They can fit twice as many in the same building site
(They say it’s alright)
Beginning with the tenants of the town of Harlow
In the interest of humanity, they’ve been told they must go
Told they must go-go-go-go.”
Given the plausibility of this piece of 1970’s satire, it can seem unrealistic to insist, as Bill Powers does (p.67):
When you start thinking about all the facets of society (as it is or as it should be) to which you wholeheartedly subscribe, you come face-to-face with the real price of understanding control theory. The sense of being carried along and protected by some benign regulating system external to yourself disappears: you are faced with taking responsibility for fundamental aspects of your life which long ago, you turned over to someone else. You see other people not as being in the grip of the system, but as authors of their own choices and their own actions.
In truth this basic freedom was there all along, but in getting involved with figuring out all the games which are going on, and in learning how to adopt the rules yourself and use them for your own ends, you, the adult, have forgotten what the point was. It’s both liberating and frightening to realize just how much of your life is in your own hands.
What makes the song such a powerful piece of social criticism, though, is that it lays bare the individual choices making up the system, as well as highlighting real inequalities in degrees of freedom. Real injustices we might say.
Bill’s preceding paragraph still pertains:
Our language is full of words which have the specific function of making social rules seem to be something other than a choice adopted after considerable effort. You have duties, responsibilities. You must do what is right. People have something called “authority”, and it must be “respected”. Children must learn to “cooperate” (i.e. do what they are told). This is a government of laws, not persons. People can be upright or transgressors. People have “rights.”
The edition might as well have been titled “The Illusion of Social Control”. Because illusion it is.
Why on earth are you arranging those graphical squiggles into the conventional shapes of English words and sentences, John? Why even use letter shapes inherited from the old Romans? So many choices are open to you.
Because I wanted to participate, via this forum, in the conversation going since at least 1992 on this topic, perhaps setting off some of the recurring issues in an engaging way, exposing my thought to criticism. I wanted to get some responses on the topic in my inbox. I used the means at my disposal to come up with something I thought might work. And it did work!
Why do you ask?
I recognise you were being rhetorical. If you are making the point I project onto your questions, then I’m not sure there’s anything wrong with my straight answer - and at the same time I think the implied criticism is something to be grappled with. Perhaps you could articulate your criticism a bit more directly?
I’m surprised that you don’t recognize that the language we use is a phenomenon of collective control as well as a means of collective control.
In that email which Greg Williams quoted in a 1992 issue of Closed Loop Bill did not recognize that his opinion led inexorably to a Humpty doctrine:
“When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’
’The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’
’The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.”
— Lewis Carroll (Charles Dodgson), *Through the Looking Glass*
Of course he had no such intention, but working out the contradictions posed some difficulties for him. Foremost in that opinion (‘screed’ is too strong a word for it) was his opposition to the idea that something superordinate to individual humans compels and constrains us, as expressed in notions like Kroeber’s ‘superorganic’. At issue is not only how we compel and constrain one another, to which he always objected with more than intellectual fervor, but more pervasively and less visibly how we control to make our environment more predictable. When there are fewer unpredictable disturbances in our environment, our limited resources for control (our degrees of freedom) are not tied up with routine matters, and we are freed to control more interesting and valuable matters. This phenomenon of making the environment more predictable so that more specialized control becomes possible is plainly laid out in the organization of molecules into cells, cells into colonies and then into multicellular organisms, and so on.
Bravo! And bravo again, John! I genuinely applaud what you’ve been doing.
Do you not see that it is your contribution to collective control? I mean, c’mon, why engage with others in this way if not to achieve a combined effect of their control and yours?
I think my jaw might actually have dropped when I read this. I’d be surprised if he denied that we compel and constrain each other; but if you are saying he denied that we control to make our environment more reliable, I’d be astonished. It would seem akin to claiming he denied we act on our environment so as to control our perceptions. Could you unpack this a bit more? We can’t check with him, unfortunately, but what precisely do you think he denied?
I still don’t know what “collective control” is. I see language as individual control of perceptions that produce collective results, as in my model of phonemic drift. That collective phenomenon – the development of systematic differences in pronunciation of the same words in different, fairly isolated groups – can be explained as the result of indivudals controlling for imitating the pronunciation of their peers.
Quoting Humpty Dumpty is not proof that Bill’s opinion (that society is not a control system) leads inexorably to a Humpty doctrine.
Thank you for clarifying why I am so opposed to your idea of “collective control”. I have seen no evidence of the existence of something superordinate to individual humans that compels and constrains us, other than individual humans themselves (and, of course, some of the non-human aspects of physical reality).
He objected to the compelling and constraining, not to the fact that it is done.
If don’t believe Bill ever objected to that, although, if he did, he might have pointed out that we don’t really make the environment more predictable; rather, we learn how the environment (actually, our perception of it) works so that we can predict and control it better.